' ' ..:p,: ;) ...:...,: . .:.-. ".::.::; .. t j .,,*=. T I; ;, :. '? : 'r .; : .: t: :':':.,:::::, . . '. 'li. ',. .- 47 , "A fter all, you can always pick up a floorboard." days, hut the show was still all Howe's, and it was his inspired wheedling and coaxing of juries that fetched customers to the firm. From 1870 on, there were plenty of big criminals on Howe & Hummel's list: Mother Mandelbaum, th great fence; Charles O. Brockway, the master counterfeiter; George Leo- nidas Leslie, the most celebrated hank robber in the country; and all the rest. The murderers signed up fastest of aU. Of the more than a thousand homi- cide cases defended by the firm between 1869 and 1907, Howe handled over six hundred and fifty. Up to his death in 1902, he appeared as defense coun- sel in nearly every celebrated mur- der trial in N ew York. Several accounts of Howe's life, among them the one in the "National Cyclopædia of Ameri- can Biography," say that he was coun- sel to Edward S. Stokes, whose shoot- ing of Jim Fisk was certainly the most famous murder of the century. Stokes ran through three trials and a dozen lawyers before he finally got off with a manslaughter convictiun and four years in the penitentiary. Howe was not one of the attorneys of record, but it 1S nevertheless possible that he was . . in charge of the case. The lawyer who generally got the credit for that notable miscarriage of justice was John R. Dos Passos, the father of the novelist and a lawyer who sometimes fronted for Howe & Hummel when it was felt that the name of the -shyster firm would be a liability. H owe was the attorney of record in the appeal of the case of Car- lyle Harris, a Columbia medical student whose poisoning with morphine of his clandestine wife, Helen Potts Harris, ranked second only to Stokes' shooring of Fisk among the century's most re- nowned killings. Howe defended Dr. Adolph Meyer, a Chicago physician who insured in his own favor the lives of his friends, then took them out in a rowboat on hot summer days and gave them beer cut with nitroglycerine, a beverage which, in the course of killing those who drink it, produces symptoms superficially indistinguishable from those caused by sunstroke; Danny Driscoll, the leader of the Whyo Gang who did in a Five Points débutante named Beezy GarrIty; Dr. Jakob Rosenzweig, a Hackensack trunk murderer who was caught when he tried to express the dis- Inembered body of a girl named Alice Augusta Bowlsby to Baltimore (three of Howe's clients dispatched bodies, or parts thereof, to Baltimore); and Martin Thorn, a Third Avenue barber who, with the help of his paramour, ..i\ ugusta N ack, beheaded a man named \\7"illie Guldensuppe and thereby provided Wil- liam Randolph Hearst with a story that gave the Evening] ournal its first real boost in circularion. Howe not only ap- peared on behalf of these homicidal clients but took care of an always over- loaded calendar of cases involving such lesser crimes as mayhem, arson, burgla- ry, assault, and all types and degrees of larceny. A CTU ALLY, despite his reputation r\.. for deviousness, Howe won more acquittals by the forceful pleading of conventional defenses than by the legal razzle-dazzle that has distinguished his best-known successors. Occasionally, however, he worked pure magic. Once he set at liberty a professional arsonist named Owen Reilly by demonstrating to the court that it could not, unless it possessed superhuman wisdom, sentence Reilly to anything, even after he had pleaded guilty to a felony. Reilly was